I have the same opinion regarding “on purpose”. The GOP has been doing this for a long, long time now while cooperating with evangelists, and if you look in from the outside it is pretty obvious that they want to keep their populace poor in education and money and use religion to keep them radicalized and anti-intellectual.

The dems either did not realize the game plan, or didn’t think it would succeed (the displayed hybris in the last decade lets me suspect the second option)